Democratic Gen Z leader, Duval Dems Chair compete for state party Vice Chair

The race for the second-most prominent position in the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) is on, and two strong candidates have already thrown their hat into the proverbial ring.

One is Jayden D’Onofrio, who may have only just turned 20, but has already put together a strong résumé in Florida politics. That includes his current work as co-founder and Chair of Florida Future Leaders, a youth-led voter engagement organization that raised more than $1 million last year for campus-based election efforts.

The other is 33-year-old Daniel Henry, who made history in 2019 by becoming the Duval County Democratic Party’s youngest Chair and the first Black LGBTQ person to hold the job.

D’Onofrio and Henry — and potentially others — are squaring off for First Vice Chair of the FDP.

In making his case for the post, Henry cited successes including delivering Duval for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 44 years and electing Donna Deegan as Jacksonville’s first female Democratic Mayor.

He vowed, if elected, to focus on repairing the party’s brand, conducting “intensive voter registration,” delivering more resources to local parties and “building a statewide infrastructure that supports Democrats at every level of political office.”

“Leadership isn’t easy, but with the support of mentors like outgoing First Vice Chair Judy Mount and Senate Democratic Leader-designate Tracie Davis, I’m ready to work with you to rebuild, expand, and win!” he said in a prepared statement.

D’Onofrio said the FDP is in dire need of recalibration following another dejecting election cycle in which the GOP surpassed Democrats by more than 1 million registered voters, made historic gains in long-blue areas of the state and picked up two new House members that switched parties this month.

“There are so many problems with the party,” he told Florida Politics. “And the bottom line is to get out of this mess, this Republican stranglehold, is by building toward the future and recognizing that we have to build up that next generation of voters.”

To achieve that goal, D’Onofrio believes the party needs to ramp up and maintain its voter registration efforts, with focused pushes in key districts that could speed the FDP’s escape from a GOP supermajority in the Legislature.

The FDP must also improve its “truly awful” data infrastructure, he said, adding that the problem predates Chair Nikki Fried’s leadership.

“It’s been that way for decades,” he said. “If you do phone or text banking, anywhere between 25% to 40% of the calls and texts you’re making go to numbers that are either not in existence, wrong numbers or for people who have passed away or no longer live in the state. You cannot accurately target people if you don’t have the data to understand who they are, where they live, what their numbers and emails are, and so on.”

No. 3 on the to-do list is, like the prior to items, a commonsense goal and one intrinsic to the successful operation of any enterprise: raising money.

According to D’Onofrio, the FDP today isn’t fully leveraging its elected officials to bring in dollars. While the party at large was conducting digital fundraising campaigns, he said, many of its members in public office weren’t.

“There’s really a lot of bare minimum things we can do to raise money, and there are also some unconventional strategies we can use,” he said. “Then there’s the most important thing, our biggest donors — do they feel like they’ve been misled by the party, that they’ve been thrown to the side with how much money they’ve given with no results? We need to address that.”

D’Onofrio and Henry are competing to succeed Mount, who must leave the post under FDP bylaws dictating that the party Chair and Vice Chair must be of different genders. She and Fried have served alongside one another since February 2023, when Fried won a race to serve the remainder of then-Chair Manny Diaz’s term, but the party’s rules will again be fully enforced after its regular election Jan. 25.

Of note, D’Onofrio — a former Chair of the Florida College Democrats and Deputy Strategy Director for Voters of Tomorrow — supported Fried’s opponent, former Sen. Annette Taddeo, in 2023.

D’Onofrio’s website lists endorsements from Senate Democratic Leader Jason Pizzo, Boca Raton Sen. Tina Polsky, political strategist Steve Schale and former Reps. Tom Keen and Katherine Waldron.

The Vice Chair job is unpaid.